Of Course Andrew Lloyd Webber Is Getting a Wii Game

I have a theater degree, and if you get one, you will learn to hate Andrew Lloyd Webber. Seriously, I thought I was a flake completely isolated from mainstream musical tastes, and then I met self-described “theater people”, all of whom own exclusively Andrew Lloyd Webber scores, Les Miserables, and Rent.

Be trapped in windowless rooms for four years with people who refuse to listen to anything else and you’ll learn to hate it too.

Thus you can guess how overjoyed I was to discover that Tubby Games is releasing an Andrew Lloyd Webber game for the Wii.

The game is called Andrew Lloyd Webber: Sing and Dance and it’s about what you’d expect. What gets me is that it’s a career retrospective. Oh, great, the man’s tendency to take great films and turn them into bloated stage shows is being celebrated. So, what, we’re going to get songs from Whistle Down the Wind or Sunset Boulevard? There’s a reason his most famous shows are from early in his career; there hasn’t really been much worth paying attention to since, largely because he stopped choosing lyricists worth listening to. I mean, Jim Steinman? Really?

Don’t get me wrong, I get why this game exists. Webber is a master of writing pop music for orchestras and moms everywhere will be thrilled. I’m just troubled that this could open up a new trend in video games and once again, I’ll be trapped in a windowless room, listening to that same old music of the night.

image courtesy Tracy Nolan on Flickr